Dagger schemes

I'm still working on my "Faux Crochet" technique and have made these two reversible bangles which use quite similar schemes- lots of browns, pinks and golds.

The first one uses gold dagger beads which also have hints if pinks and purples on them. I teamed these with brown hex beads in shiny and matte.


My second one uses pink daggers beads which have swirls of other colours running through them. I teamed these with seed beads in pinks and browns.



Keeping to the same colour scheme I have also beaded this bangle using pearls in lost of shades of chocolate brown, pinks and greens.

Flocking

I spent the day with the lovely and talented Julie Smallwood of Natty Jewels and had lots of fun playing around with colour and flock.

The item we were flocking was an old table with a distinctive texture. At first the plan was to section it all off into small squares but we soon realised this was beyond our level of patience and skill so we moved onto using the tiles as natural barriers between each colour.


Next was making the colour choices- there were lots of lovely colours to choose from.
I'm glad it wasn't my decsion, I would have had trouble choosing!

We began by Julie narrowing down her choices to her favourite colours.


As there were 9 squares she narrowed them down further to 9 colours.


We soon realised though that choosing 9 which were different enough without there being too much of a bias towards one colour wasn't going to be easy. She wanted it to look balanced with no one colour or variant of that colour featuring too much.

So we changed plan and instead went for purples, lilacs and pinks which all seemed to work together nicely.


And we were off!

Flocking is time consuimg and messy and a few hours later we'd run out of background paint, were covered in fluff and tired and the table still wasn't finished.
Oh well- off we went to dinner and I left Julie to finish the table on her own....

Yet more red

I'm still working on my series of herringbone ropes for the red months in my Colour Challenge and have almost completed the red+ mixed colours version. It just needs its hidden clasp added.

I've now started to bead my all reds version and as soon as this one is done I'll be beading one in red and its complementary colour- green.

I began this red version planning to just use reds but found that you could nto see any distinction between them as the rope grew so I went back to the drawing board and added in pinks and red-violets so you could actually see some of the work I was putting in!

Colourful Temari

I had a busy day today temari-ing- something I've been itching to do for a while. I love using threads and of course they're just another excuse to play with colour!

The first one I made was a Rose Garden design and, as I'm still working away using reds, I used an analogous scheme with red, orange and yellow.

The second was more complicated, and probably the most complicated one I have made, and uses an "interlinked pentagon" design.

Again to keep in with the challenge I used 12 different reds. Right from orangy-red, through pinky-reds and violet-reds, and teamed them with a green as the contrast colour.

As I made this one I used pins to help me see where I needed to work and planned to add another embellishement to the centre of each pentagon at the end.

But once I had finished I decided I liked the look of them so may leave them in, at least until I decide what else to do.

Onye 2- (Tropicalimso)

Well, she's all done and I love her!

In the end I used orange, pink, teal and gold- sunshiny, happy colours.

This will appear as a project in issue 19 of Bead magazine.

Orange, pink and ?

I know for my next version of my Onye pendant I want to still use orange but don't want to make it too similar to the one already beaded- which just used oranges and yellows.
I have often loved the colour combination of orange and pink- such as the jewellery in this photo:


But I want to see if I can come up with a scheme that uses 'colour rules' and both those colours which I like.

My previous pendant was boldly orange- so this time I want to see if I can use orange in a more subtle way.

So I headed to Color Scheme designer.

Putting in a bold orange gives me this at first- nice but basically too orange
A complimentary scheme is this- nice but I want to throw in at least one more colour
Triadic results in this- still too bold
Tetradic- again nice but still bold
Analogic- very nice- and the mustardy yellow/ orange tones it down for me
Accented analogic- yum! I love the tealy colour in there- my kind of colour combo!

But the search is still on.

A recent Colour Lovers blog post - on Tropicalismo- leads me to a fab colour combo:

Cell Division

Color by COLOURlovers


A search for orange and fuschia colour palettes gives me this:

Color by COLOURlovers

and this one

Color by COLOURlovers

A google search for pink and orange colour schemes gives me some good results:

Here are some schemes using orange and pink also with white and yellow- very nice
This subtle orange and pink scheme make sme think maybe I need to tone down the fuschia?
Orange and pink in fashion
An orange and pink art challenge

Soon my head is spinning and I decide the only way to work out my colours is to actually look at what I own!
Check back to see what I end up using.

A day in Paris

I am in Paris, the sun is shining, I have no-one else to think about and no time to be home by. Could this day get any better?
Well okay, I could have found beads but that's a minor complaint!

It seemed that all around me today was colour. From the food I ate, to the museum pieces I saw, even down to the building works I walked by.

My mind was especially focused on looking for oranges as that is the colour I'm now working with, but that didn't limit the photos I took.

My trip to Paris began with lunch and this great colour combo of melon gazpacho- some sort of sweet sorbet (the taste bud explosion wiped out my memory of what it was) and yellow bread (not nice to eat but set the colour combo off great!)


My next stop was a visit to the Museum of Decorative Arts.

This cabinet of a dark oak with a strip of cobalt blue took my breathe away and I wish I had a picture that captured it better. I will definitely come back to this combo when I work in blue!


I love glass in many forms and this arrangement of mixed colours and shapes looked fabulous.


This piece of glassware with its two different 'blues' was interesting.


These multi-coloured works which used pink, blue, green and purple were, inspiring.


On the look out for orange combinations which appealed, I found this chair with its use of orange, white, yellow and a navy blue. I like the idea of the blue as I think black would have been too 'garish' or 'warning sign' if that makes sense- the blue definitely works to bring the sharpness down. Blue is orange's complementary colour.


More orange- here is orange, white and black- although I like this combination in the plastic I do think using navy- such as in the photo above- would have been nice and altered how the orange looked.


Here orange is mixed with a khaki green- I like this and would never have thought of it.


Once I'd finished in the musuem I was off to wander and take more photos.

I came across these wonderful blue doors and couldn't resist a photo- I think the redish-gold door furniture subtly makes this colour work so well.


Green and grey- who knew?


In a shop, looking for beads, I came across this range of jewellery focused on orange and pink- I think this is my favourite way to use orange!